Versus Narrative : The Addictions Issue – Call For Submissions

Announcing a call for submissions of poetry to CV2’s Winter 2024 issue, Versus Narrative: The Addiction Issue, co-edited by poets Conyer Clayton and Hannah Green.

As the editors for this very special issue, we feel it’s important, as we request poems that explore this theme, to share a bit about our own experiences with addiction and recovery; about our experiences with both the narratives we encounter, and the ones we create, around these subjects.

Hannah Green has been recovering from alcohol and drug addiction since 2020. There are many narratives around addiction, yet at times, she felt like addiction was her only narrative. Writing about her experience opened up a space where she could wriggle in and start telling her own story again.

Conyer Clayton has been sober and in self-led recovery from substance use disorder for nearly six years. They also had various eating disorders for a number of years. Writing about addiction has helped them move through the pervading shame and stigma that these things can carry. Regaining a sense of agency over their narrative has been an important part of their recovery process.

While these brief introductions will hopefully give a sense of our own relationships with addiction and recovery, we want to see your own, unique, individual experiences represented in this issue. We welcome submissions that engage with personally-lived experiences of addiction and/or recovery, and we also welcome submissions that engage thoughtfully with the lived experiences of people close enough to you for you to feel comfortable exploring them. As with any subject, we would gently encourage you, if submitting work that discusses an addiction and/or recovery experience that is not directly your own, to consider your positionality to addiction and/or recovery as you write and submit.

In seeking poems for this theme, we are particularly interested in intersectionality, such as the intersection of addiction with disability and illness, including mental illness and mental health more broadly; recovery from addiction, including explorations of various recovery communities and support groups, or lack thereof; intergenerational and familial addiction patterns and inheritances; experiences with medical care, positive and negative, including explorations of the inequities in access to care that exist for so many members of marginalized groups, including people who are racialized and who are members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community; how substance use disorder and/or disordered eating can impact day-to-day living both during addiction and throughout recovery; the impact of addiction on interpersonal relationships; explorations of the impact socio-economic privileges and/or the lack thereof can have on addiction care, recovery, and support; and more.

Please consider the above as a non-exhaustive list of suggestions of the types of subjects you might explore in the work you submit. Crucially, if you are someone who lives with addiction, has lived with addiction, and/or is in recovery, we want to read whatever you want to send us; we do not expect or require work that is solely “about” the theme of this issue. If you are in addiction or recovery, we want your poems – about anything. The topic of addiction can be centred or not centred in the work you submit, and we will be equally grateful to get to engage with it. You are you, and you are important, and we want your work.

Deadline to submit: October 1st, 2023. Click here to submit.